Posts Tagged ‘Crytek’

Crysis 3: a first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic, alien-invaded New York, in which you wear a Nanosuit which enables you to temporarily become invisible, damage-resistant or able to leap moderately-sized walls in a single bound. It has a lot of graphics. It’s out now in the US, and tomorrow in the UK. Here is an opinion.Read the rest of this entry »

News collectors VG247 have a bunch of Crysis 3 footage, which I have cheerfully reblogged below. Producer-man Michael Read has a bit to say about it, too, explaining what makes that section – Swamp – unique. Well, it’s swampy green and might murky, for a start. But also you get to kill men! Oh. Well, I am sure there is other stuff. Looks awesome, actually, but I am clearly Crytek’s target audience: someone who looks forward to whispering MAXIMUM COCKNEY as my battle chum burbles in my ear. And just look at it!

It is a wonderful week for insanely inventive videogames. The long-awaited Antichamber (which I’m splattering my feeble brain against right now) lands on Thursday, and 2013’s Global Game Jam just forced a hand inside its own sternum and produced a glistening goldmine of bloody great games. But in between all that, I know I’ll be needing a slightly more traditional palette cleanser. Enter Crysis 3’s open beta. Men get shot, and they neither spray you with chunky metaphysical sophistries nor make you suddenly aware of the faintly fluttering organ that could stop sustaining your life at any given moment. They just, you know, stop shooting back. And so on and so forth. But oh, there are neat powers. And bows. And some – in the grand scheme of shooters – fairly novel modes. Study up on their mysterious ways after the break.

Every dark cloud has a silver lining. It’s a delightfully optimistic statement, though in truth, it’s not always, well, true. (Note: I mean this in the metaphorical sense. I don’t claim to be an expert on clouds’ relative silver content, as I still believe they’re made of cotton candy.) Case in point: at first, it sure seemed like Darksiders dev Vigil Games would be getting some of said rain in its gothic Death mascara while everyone else found new homes in the wake of THQ’s collapse. But now, that dark cloud within a silver-lined dark cloud has found a different silver lining. On the wings of nanosuit-clad angels, Crytek’s descended to save the day. Or, well, most of it, anyway.

THQ is dead. Long live… er, not THQ. But its motionless remains haven’t gone undisturbed. A number of major publishers descended, vulture-like, to make off with the choicest cuts money could buy. And also Homefront. Yesterday, however, we had no idea what exactly was next for the likes of Metro, Saints Row, Company of Heroes, Darksiders, and South Park. Sure, they’ve found new homes, but will they fit in? Or will they be forced to live in the cramped cupboards of neglect, with nary a wizarding school in sight? Well, it’s still a bit early to say for sure, but – based on comments from each publisher – things are at least looking up.

In my more soulful, reflective moments, I can’t help but look out into the vast sea of human suffering and ask myself, “Why? Why do we Crysis?” The answers, of course, are many and multifarious – like some kind of gigantic, infini-brained wisdom hydra – but they all boil down to one core: single-player. Case in point: Crysis 2’s multiplayer wasn’t terrible by any means, but it just didn’t do enough to stand out. Crytek, however, seems to think the series has multiplayer greatness encoded in its nanomachine-bloated DNA, so it’s once again aiming high with Crysis 3. And while things like the hunted-becomes-the-hunter, er, Hunter mode sound fun on paper, they’re far from proven quantities. So that’s where you come in, with your hideously calloused testing fingers and unrelentingly skewering skepticism. Details after the break.

Here at RPS, we like to have a little fun every once in a while, but it’s time for real talk: Warface is no laughing matter. It afflicts several billion people per day, and chronic Warface has stumped even the techno-magic of modern medicine for years. Recently, it took Alec from us. Now he just sits in a corner all day, banging his head against the wall and mumbling about how he “must forever live in the shadow of his own Sistine Chapel.” And well, you’ve seen what it does to RPS comment threads. Really, it’s a misnomer: Warface is actually a disease of the mind. An apparition of the soul. Friends don’t let friends face Warface face war war war face far wace wa rface w arfac e.

W… who am I? I’ve suddenly forgotten everything about myself. Oh, but I do have this note saying Warface is now in closed beta. Seems innocent enough.

I do so miss the days when the majority of videogame weapons were completely outrageous. Sure, today’s crop of Battlehomes and Medalfronts adore their reality-balking setpieces, but look up at their skies, and you’ll see that even the sun has donned its most serious warface. Comparatively extinct, then, is the cartoony carnage of Doom’s BFG – or, more recently, Painkiller’s, er, painkiller. Heck, even Far Cry 3 kept its open-world madness grounded with a fairly tame arsenal. It’s nice, then, to at least see its equally tear-prone cousin Crysis 3 go completely bonkers. The Typhoon apparently fires “500 bullets per second.” Its alt-fire, meanwhile, looks to be some kind of flame catapult. Watch as it wreaks havoc on an icky, sticky squid swamp after the break.

Watching the latest in Crysis 3‘s “Seven Wonders” series, I can’t help but be reminded of totally amazing 7DFPS entry Vonneguts & Glory. No, Crytek’s hardware-hemorrhaging squidshoot hasn’t suddenly started dressing like Wolfenstein 3D, but it has slammed on the breaks and shifted into reverse for some reason. The effect is neat-looking, I suppose, but now I really just want a mega-budget backward shooter. Start at the end, un-shoot your victims and watch as they happily go home to their families, un-fire un-explosions from your un-gun, etc. Oh well, though. For now we’ll just have to ponder what could’ve been while watching Prophet moonwalk through Wall Street. Take a peep after the break – unless, of course, real life’s actually been in reverse the entire time and you already have.

Crysis 3 has taken on a strange, amorphous shape in my head. I’ve not really been following it closely enough to really say all that much about it, and having gone back to look at all the previous materials to post this video – including Nathan’s interview with Mr Crytek, in which he talks about a lot of things which are not Crysis 3 at all – I’m rather excited. I realise I am in a (handsome, intelligent and perceptive) minority in having had a great time in Crysis 2, but I can’t help feeling that Crytek’s mission is laudable. They really do want to make the shooter that covers everything, and is all things to all shooter-fans. Yerli’s quotes in that interview suggest he’s lost none of his ambition, and it’s clear that all kinds of concessions have to be made in projects of this magnitude. And the very least they are aiming high. This new footage, below, contains some spectacular moments. Go take a look.

If you have a perfectly pristine photographic memory for Adam’s posts – and honestly, who doesn’t? – you’ll remember that he recently came across the first episode in EA’s Albert-Hughes-directed “Seven Wonders” Crysis 3 series. He also said these things, “I think I’m supposed to care about the story here, but is it really anything more than an excuse to cram opposing forces into an interesting place so they can shoot each other? Nothing wrong with that but I’d prefer to see more of the weighty in-engine conflict and less of the build-up.” Frankly, I share that sentiment, and apparently, so does Albert Hughes. Episode 2, you see, is all action. OK, and there’s some cheesy narration, but you can ignore that.

Crysis 3 isn’t the first piece of entertainment to show us New York reclaimed by nature, but the city become prison-park could make for a compelling setting. The latest video advertisement for the game is the first part of the ‘Seven Wonders’ series, directed by Albert Hughes who you may know as one half of the Hughes brothers, mighty cinema-men of From Hell and Menace II Society. I think I’m supposed to care about the story here, but is it really anything more than an excuse to cram opposing forces into an interesting place so they can shoot each other? Nothing wrong with that but I’d prefer to see more of the weighty in-engine conflict and less of the build-up.